Fitting Sentences : Identity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Prison Narratives

Fitting Sentences is an analysis of writings by prisoners from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in North America, South Africa, and Europe. Jason Haslam examines the ways in which these writers reconfigure subjectivity and its relation to social power structures, especially the prison structure itself, while also detailing the relationship between prison and slave narratives. Specifically, Haslam reads texts by Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Oscar Wilde, Martin Luther King, Jr., Constance Lytton, and Breyten Breytenbach to find the commonalities and divergences in their stories. While the relationship between prison and subjectivity has been mapped by Michel Foucault and defined as “a strategic distribution of elements” that act “to exercise a power of normalization”, Haslam demonstrates some of the complex connections and dissonances between these elements and the resistances to them. Each work shows how carceral practices can be used to attack a variety of identifications, be they sexual, racial, economic, or any of a variety of social categories. By analysing the works of specific prison writers but not being limited to a single locale or narrow time span, Fitting Sentences offers a significant historical and global overview of a unique genre in literature. Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Opening Statements 11 PART ONE: The Carceral Society 33 CHAPTER ONE. ‘They locked the door on my meditations’: Thoreau, Society, and the Prison House of Identity 33 CHAPTER TWO. ‘Cast of Characters’: Problems of Identity and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 59 PART TWO: Writing Wrongs 97 CHAPTER THREE. ‘To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law’: The Paradox of the Individual in De Profundis 97 CHAPTER FOUR. Positioning Discourse: Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail’ 119 PART THREE: Prisons, Privilege, and Complicity 147 CHAPTER FIVE. Being Jane Warton: Lady Constance Lytton and the Disruption of Privilege 147 CHAPTER SIX. Frustrating Complicity in Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist 173 Closing Statements / Opening Arguments 199 Notes 205 Works Cited 245 Index 267 "Fitting Sentences is an analysis of writings by prisoners from nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America, South Africa, and Europe. Jason Haslam examines the ways in which these writers reconfigure subjectivity and its relationship with social power structures, especially the prison itself, while also detailing the relationship between prison and slave narratives. Specifically, Haslam reads texts by Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Oscar Wilde, Martin Luther King, Jr, Constance Lytton, and Breyten Breytenbach to find the commonalities and divergences in their stories."--Résumé de l'éditeur "Fitting Sentences is an analysis of writings by prisoners from nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America, South Africa, and Europe. Jason Haslam examines the ways in which these writers reconfigure subjectivity and its relationship with social power structures, especially the prison itself, while also detailing the relationship between prison and slave narratives. Specifically, Haslam reads texts by Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Oscar Wilde, Martin Luther King, Jr, Constance Lytton, and Breyten Breytenbach to find the commonalities and divergences in their stories."--Jacket